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Anssi Kristian Kullberg is
presently employed as a researcher for the Legal and Country Intelligence
Service, Western and Central Asia Desk, at the Finnish Directorate of
Immigration. This interview represents his personal views only and not those of
his employer. On Black Tuesday, 11th September, he was in Kyrgyzstan, on his way
to the notorious Ferghana Valley, in a reconstruction of the late Finnish
Marshal C.G.E. Mannerheim's intelligence expedition to Turkistan and China in
1906-1908.

Question: Was the Taliban the creation of Pakistan? Can you tell us
about its formation and how was Russia involved in it?

Answer:The Taliban was not a creation of Pakistan, although Pakistan was
among several states that contributed to the genesis and development of this
peculiar movement. It is true that the Taliban (which was established only as
late as in 1994 as a religious movement) had a significant influx from Pakistani
madrassas. But the Taliban is not only an extreme religious movement, but also
an ethnic Pashtun one. The Pashtuns are a bit less than half of Afghanistan's
population, but in Pakistan there are 16 million resident Pashtuns plus 3
million as refugees. There are more Pashtuns in Pakistan than in Afghanistan
nowadays. The "Pakistanis" involved in Afghanistan are in fact Afghans.

The role of the Pakistani Islamist opposition in the formation and support of
the Taliban is widely recorded. But more important are those who made it a
military power. This is where Russia enters the game, too. In order to
understand the Taliban, we must recall the background situation in Afghanistan
ever since the events in 1970s.

The Taliban is not monolithic. Even less so is the Northern Alliance. Neither
were the Afghan communists united. This was made evident by the internal power
struggles following the ousting of King Zahir Shah in 1973. Daoud was overthrown
and killed by communists in 1978. But the communists were divided into the Khalq
faction, favored by China, and the Parcham faction, favored by the Soviet Union.
In 1978 it was the Khalq faction that took over, but their more moderate leader
Nur
Mohammed Taraki was overthrown and killed by the hardliner Khalq communist
Hafizullah Amin. In 1979, the Soviet Spetsnaz murdered Amin and replaced him
with the Parcham follower Babrak Karmal, who was close to the KGB. Then the
Soviet army invaded.

The communist secret service Khad (KhAD), whose leaders were Karmal and Sayid
Mohammed Najibullah, was actually an Afghan branch of the KGB. It had been
preceded by the communist secret services of Taraki and Amin (AGSA, KAM), but
from 1979 onwards this organization of terror was instructed and trained by the
KGB. The culture of terror and the horrible persecution of the civil population
continued without a pause from the communist takeover up until the overthrowing
of Najibullah's regime in 1992 when Massoud liberated Kabul. Western minds seem
to implicitly suppose that when the Cold War was over, the communists and the
structures they had created just suddenly disappeared. This is a recurrent fatal
misperception especially of the Americans.

According to Professor Azmat Hayat Khan of the University of Peshawar, when
Ahmad Shah Massoud's mujaheddin liberated Kabul in 1992, and Najibullah gave up
power, the communist generals of the army and of Khad agreed to prolong the
Afghan civil war in order to discredit President Burhanuddin Rabbani's mujahid
government and prevent Afghanistan from stabilizing. The Uzbek communist General
Abdurrashid Dostum continued the rebellion against Rabbani and Massoud
in Mazar-i-Sharif, massively backed by the Soviet Union and later by Russia and
Uzbekistan. Another rebellious general was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Most of the
ethnic Pashtun Khalq army generals as well as those of the Khad defected to
Hekmatyar's troops. A decisive role was the one played by General Shahnawaz
Tanai, the communist commander of
the artillery, who defected to Hekmatyar's side as early as in 1990. Later in
1995, when Hekmatyar's rebellion was losing strength, Tanai defected to the
Taliban. So did many other communist army and Khad officers.

It was Tanai's defection that provided the Taliban with Soviet artillery, Soviet
air force, Soviet intelligence and Soviet technical and military knowledge. The
American Anthony Arnold argued already then that Tanai's moves were a
KGB-inspired provocation. The former KGB General Oleg Kalugin said that it was
Moscow who trained most of the terrorists the US is now chasing.

As regards the Taliban, it was nothing special when they took over Kandahar in
1994. Kandahar was a Pashtun city and the strict interpretation of Islam the
Taliban propounds is not so much based on the Qur'an but on the narrow-minded
social norms of an agrarian Pashtun village. Mullah Omar is often described as
having the background of a relatively simple-minded rustic mullah, although he
was also politically active in Mohammed Nabi Mohammadi's
Harakat-i-Inqilab-i-Islami (Revolutionary Islamic Movement), which later opposed
the Taliban.

But apart from Mullah Mohammed Omar and some other leaders who seem to have
truly religious backgrounds (and no other education), the Taliban's military and
intelligence are dominated by Soviet-trained communists.

Besides Tanai, there is for example the late
first Taliban military commander and one of its founders, "Mullah Borjan", whose
real name was Turan Abdurrahman, a prominent communist military officer. Many
Taliban "mullahs" have no
religious training at all. They are former communist military and security
agents who have grown up beards and adopted new names and identities replete
with the title "mullah". The Taliban artillery commander was the former Soviet
Army's Afghan military intelligence officer Shah Sawar. The Taliban intelligence
service chief Mohammed Akbar used to head a department of the Khad. And the
Taliban air force commander Mohammed Gilani was a communist general, too.
Perhaps because of this immensely influential influx into the Taliban, their
interpretation of Islam is quite alien for most of the world's Muslims, but
closely resembles the interpretation of Islam that the communists and Russia
have traditionally espoused in their anti-Islamic propaganda.

The decisive strengthening of the Taliban took place in 1995-1996, when it was
seen as a "stabilizing" force in Afghanistan. This was a great fallacy based on
the Taliban's success in Kandahar, which was indeed their "home field". Anywhere
else the Taliban did not bring about stability, but quite the opposite. Among
those with a rising interest in the Taliban forces, were all the main players:
Russia and its satellite regimes in Central Asia, the US, Pakistan, and Saudi
Arabia. At the initiative of the Turkmen dictator Saparmurat Niyazov, the
Russian energy giant Gazprom, headed by the then Russian Prime Minister Viktor
Chernomyrdin, and the US firm Unocal, contracted to lay a pipeline from
Turkmenistan to Pakistan, circumventing Iran and crossing the Afghan territory
that the Taliban had supposedly "stabilized". For Pakistan, it has been a
traditional national interest to secure energy supplies from Central Asia, since
it is sandwiched between two vehemently hostile great powers, India and Iran.
For Russia, this was seen as a way to control Central Asian energy resources and
to extend its influence towards the Indian Ocean. Two Saudi Arabian oil
companies were also involved.

During the same years, the Taliban received sizable armed support. It did not
come mainly from Pakistan. Financial succor came from Saudi Arabia. But the most
decisive increase in the Taliban's strength came from Russia: the defections of
the Khalq and Khad generals directly into the Taliban's leadership, vast amounts
of Russian weaponry in several mysteriously "captured" stashes, including a very
suspicious "hijacking" and escape of a Russian jet loaded with weapons that
ended up in the hands of the Taliban's ex-communist leaders. With these new
weapons, the Taliban marched on Herat in 1995, and finally managed to capture
Kabul in 1996. Najibullah was hanged, but Najibullah's hanging by his former
Taliban-turned protégés seems to have camouflaged the actual developments in the
Afghan power struggle.

Russia had an interest to cut the strong ties between Massoud's mujaheddin and
the Tajik opposition that Russia had crushed since it attacked Tajikistan in
1992 and backed the communists into power there. The old provocateur Hekmatyar
was by then defeated and had finally given up his fight - after losing his men
and arms by Tanai's defection to the Taliban - and accepted a seat in the
government in compensation. Since Hekmatyar was finished, a new Pashtun force
was needed in those years. Taliban was a rising force that various external
players tried to exploit by infiltration, support and manipulation.

When the Cold War was declared over by the West, it did not stop elsewhere.
After 1989 the West really lost interest in Afghanistan and until some months
before his death Massoud was trying to appeal to it in vain. The West was
uninterested, but others were. Pakistan, of course, was interested in the goings
on in its unstable neighbor. Saudi Arabia was financing and supporting dangerous
Sunni fundamentalist groups, and later the Taliban. The Saudis also provided
them with their own Saudi fanatics that had become troublesome at home. Iran was
supporting its own agents within Afghan Shia groups. And the Soviet Union and
later Russia continued to provide massive armed support to the last communist
dictator of Afghanistan, Najibullah, and later to the notorious General Dostum.

The Russian principle was "divide and rule", with the basic idea of keeping the
West out and assuring that the region would not strengthen so that the Soviet
empire could return once it has regained its military might. Because of this
stratagem, Russia has supported the Tajiks of the Northern Alliance through
Tajikistan - only sufficiently to form a buffer zone against the Taliban, but
without being able to gain substantial victories or to intervene in Tajikistan.
Moreover, Russia has been arming and supporting the Uzbeks under the command of
Dostum and General Malik who later defected to the Taliban's side. This support
has been directed through Uzbekistan and still continues - ironically, with the
West's full blessing. Less known has been the Russian support directed through
Turkmenistan to the Taliban, and to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan that is
said to threaten Karimov's rule there.

Question: What was and is the role of the CIA in all this? Was Pakistan's ISI the
CIA's long arm? Was bin Laden a CIA agent?

Answer:A chronic feature of American intelligence policy seems to be
historical amnesia and inability to see the complex nature of conflicts and
local relationships. This was also manifested during the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan. British intelligence and part of the Pakistani intelligence
community clashed with the US already during the Cold War period, because they
wanted to support Ahmad Shah Massoud, the "Lion of Panjshir". It was Massoud and
his mujaheddin who finally, after getting Stingers from the British, managed to
make the war too expensive for the Soviets, forcing them to retreat in 1989.

Meanwhile, the CIA was incompetent enough to be dependent on the Pakistani
intelligence services that, especially in Zia ul-Haq's period, favored Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, a pompous figure who claimed to have extensive contacts throughout
the Islamic world. He indeed had some contacts, including with Osama bin Laden,
but he was considered to be a KGB provocateur by Massoud and many others, and
was never of any help in the Afghan independence struggle.

Instead of fighting the Soviet occupants,
Hekmatyar preferred to fight other Afghans, and to conspire with suspicious Arab
circles imported by his contact bin Laden to Peshawar. The Stingers that the CIA
had provided to Hekmatyar, were not used to liberate Afghanistan. Instead,
Hekmatyar sold them to Iran, and they were later used against the Americans in a
well-known incident.

When the Soviet troops moved out, Hekmatyar pursued a bloody rebellion against
the legal Afghan government, devastating the country along with another rebel
general, Dostum. (Though they were not aligned.) In 1993, Hekmatyar supported
the KGB general and spymaster Haidar Aliyev's coup in Azerbaijan and, in 1994,
Hekmatyar was involved in supporting pro-Russian Lezghin terrorists in the
Caucasus. Hekmatyar is still active. He lives in Teheran, and has recently
finally revealed his true colors by siding with the Taliban.

As far as I know, Osama bin Laden was never a CIA agent. However, there are
relatively plausible claims that he was close to Saudi intelligence, especially
to the recently fired intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faizal, until they
broke up. Osama first appeared in the Afghan War theater either in 1979, or, at
the latest in 1984. But at the beginning he was first and foremost a
businessman. He served the interests of those who wished to construct roads
accessible for tanks to cross through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean. This
might also explain his characteristic opportunism - quite atypical for a
self-proclaimed warrior of faith.

International jihadists surely want to portray him as a religious fighter or
Muslim hero, but this is not the true picture, but, mostly, a myth created by
the Western media. This is where Arab, Pakistani and Indonesian teenagers learn
that Osama is a fighter in a universal struggle of Islam against its oppressors.

But bin Laden never fought the Soviets to liberate Afghanistan. For most of this
period, he was not even in Afghanistan. He was managing an office in Peshawar,
and the only credible claim about him being in a battle has been made by the
former CIA official Milton Bearden concerning a minor skirmish that took place
in spring 1987.

Bin Laden's first significant contact in Peshawar was the Palestinian Professor
Abdullah Azzam, whom bin Laden has later described as his mentor. Azzam was an
Arab idealist, who wanted to concentrate on the liberation of Afghanistan, and
who wanted to support Massoud, whom he correctly regarded as being the right
person to uphold. Bin Laden disagreed. He wanted to support the disloyal
Islamist fanatic Hekmatyar. As a result, Azzam and his son were blown up in a
car bomb in 1989, and consequently, bin Laden took over his organization and
transformed it into Al-Qaida (the Base). Already before these events, he started
to transform the agency by flooding it with his Arab contacts from the Middle
East. These Arabs were not interested in liberating Afghanistan as much as in
hiding from the law enforcement agencies of their own countries, most of all
Egypt's.

When Russia attacked Tajikistan, bin Laden and his folks were by no means
interested in liberating Tajikistan from a new communist yoke. Instead, bin
Laden left Afghanistan and dispersed his terrorist network, directing it to act
against the West. It is bizarre that a man claiming to be an Islamic
fundamentalist supported the invasion by the Arab socialist (and thereby
atheist) Iraq against Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, both with conservative Islamic
regimes.

Al-Qaida's supported all causes and activities against the West: the US, Turkey,
Israel, and any pro-Western Muslim regime like Pakistan. Robbers on the island
of Jolo in the Philippines qualified for Al-Qaida's support although they hardly
knew anything about the Qur'an. They were immediately they were portrayed as
"Islamic fighters". Even the strictly atheist anti-Turkish terrorist
organization PKK has been welcomed. At the same time they definitely have not
supported Muslims advocating Turkish-modeled moderate independence, like the
Chechens, the original Tajik opposition or the Azeri government under President
Abulfaz Elchibey.

As concerning Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, I think it would be
gross underestimation of a potential regional great power and its British
colonial traditions of military and intelligence to describe it just as an arm
of the CIA or of the Islamists. These are widespread myths. The ISI is neither
the hero nor the villain of this story. I think the ISI is interested simply in
the national interest of Pakistan, which consists of four main elements:
security against the hostile strong neighbors India and Iran, security against
the instability and uncontrolled forces ravaging Afghanistan and infiltrating
Pakistan through the large Pashtun population, the conflict over Kashmir, and
Pakistan's own international status.

Afghanistan is an historical buffer zone in the ancient Great Game of Central
Eurasia. It is the gateway through which Pakistan's enemies can attack or
destabilize it, and it is equally the buffer that stops these enemies.
Pakistan's is interested in regional stability while its enemies seek to use any
instability against it. There is a great divide within Pakistan between
Pakistani nationalists and internationalist Islamists. Pakistan is relatively
democratic compared with its neighbors - even including India, considering its
treatment of minorities and the Kashmir issue. It, thus, has the problems of a
democracy. Pakistan has quite free and critical press, local administration and
intellectual opposition, the Islamists included. It is not, and has never been,
an Islamist dictatorship like Saudi Arabia.

Question: Can you chart the relationship between the ISI and the Taliban?

Answer:The policy of the ISI was strongly correlated with developments in
Pakistan's leadership. The main divide concerning the ISI's Afghanistan policies
did not concern religious issues as it did the ethnic question related to the
political and military aspirations of the Pashtun people in both Pakistan and
Afghanistan. Actually one of the greatest dangers to Pakistan's national
existence would be the emergence of the idea of Greater Pashtunistan, splitting
Pakistan in two.

This was an idea favored and agitated by the pro-Soviet Pashtuns - many of whom
are now influential in the Taliban. The Pakistani researcher Musa Khan Jalalzai
noticed this and described these people as "enemies of Pakistani interests".

India and Iran would like to split Pakistan and destroy it, and Russian
geopolitics is still based on a "final thrust to the South". Iran and India
equally fear that Baluchistan, Kashmir and Punjab would finally be united under
Pakistani rule. Incorporating Pashtunistan, Pakistan has the potential to become
a South Asian superpower with plausible expansionist chances. Yet this has never
really been an aspiration of Pakistan. Like Turkey under Ataturk, Pakistan under
such leaders
as Ayub Khan and now Pervez Musharraf has been introverted in its nationalism
and based on constitutional and national ideas similar to those of present day
Turkey and France.

During the military dictatorship of Zia ul-Haq the policy turned more Islamist,
and during this period the ISI strongly supported Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar proved
disloyal and finally defected to Iran. During Benazir Bhutto's government,
support has shifted to the Taliban. This was decided by the Interior Minister
Nasirullah Babar. It is history's irony that the first female prime minister of
Pakistan helped to strengthen the misogynist Taliban regime. The ISI started to
get disillusioned and
disappointed with the Taliban during the thoroughly corrupt "democracy"
continued under Nawaz Sharif. There have been rumors that the ISI wished to
influence the Taliban and to empower "a third force" among the more moderate
Taliban leaders to take over it. It is in connection with this that Shahnawaz
Tanai actually defected to Pakistan, and the ISI was
dealing with the former communists who were so powerful within the Taliban.

Luckily for Western interests, General Pervez Musharraf took over. This takeover
was the best event in Pakistani history as far as the West is concerned,
although it was sadly ignored in the West during the Clinton administration.
Musharraf was portrayed as a military dictator and a supporter of the causes of
the Taliban and of an alliance with China (all sins of his predecessors).
Musharraf is profoundly pro-Western, secular in mind and pragmatic in foreign
policy. He in fact tried to
form constructive relationships with all the neighboring countries (Iran, India
and Afghanistan). His peace initiatives in Kashmir were stalled by Indian
arrogance, and the West turned a cold shoulder to its old ally, which has been a
source of great bitterness in Pakistan, especially since the West has been very
inconsistent in choosing when to support Pakistan and when not to. But during
the Musharraf reign, human rights and the position of women in Pakistan have
improved considerably.

Constructive relations with whomever rules Afghanistan have been Realpolitik for
Pakistan. Although Musharraf, immediately after seizing power, started to
undermine the support for the Taliban, he could not remove the recognition given
to the Taliban government, as there was no other Afghan government - the Rabbani
government having been ousted and categorically hostile to Pakistan, partly for
legitimate reasons. Pakistan has been trying ever since to construct new
anti-Taliban alliances, as well as trying to find intra-Taliban frictions to
exploit. But the West should be very careful and measured in its pressure on
Pakistan. The Taliban is really not under Pakistan's thumb, and never was.

I think the ISI first saw the Taliban as a potential instrument. Then it saw it
as a threat that had to be infiltrated and controlled. Then they saw it as a
burden. Surely the ISI wished to control and contain the Taliban, but their
success has been rather doubtful (as has been others'). Many analysts have paid
attention to the fact that Afghan as well as non-Afghan adventurers like bin
Laden, have always been very talented at exploiting the surrounding states as
well as both superpowers.

Another distorted myth is propagated by India. It is that the Kashmiri
secessionism is terrorism and a Pakistani creation. This is very far from
reality. More than 80% of Kashmiris would probably prefer independence, but at
the same time they reject the Islamist model. There are several small but
media-visible Islamist groups operating in Kashmir, or at least proclaiming the
Kashmiri cause. But these people are not really interested in Kashmiri
independence. They are interested in jihad. Such
Islamists appear wherever there is a war (during Bosnia's struggle for
independence and in the Albanian civil war, in Chechnya, Kashmir and so on).
Their "help" is usually just an added burden to the ones they purport to help,
since they are seldom fighting for any liberation. These "professional"
jihadists also seem to be more common in internet cafes and among Arab diasporas
in the West than in places where Muslim nations face real oppression.

We must remember that Musharraf cannot possibly surrender to India in the
Kashmir dispute. This would not only be political suicide, but it would not end
the Kashmir conflict - quite the contrary. It would mean importing the Kashmiri
conflict into Pakistan, and against Pakistan. What happened in Afghanistan, with
millions of refugees flooding to Pakistan, should not happen with Kashmir. This
would be an outright catastrophe for both Pakistan and India, let alone the
Kashmiri people. Therefore it is the most crucial interest of the West to
prevent India from escalating the Kashmir conflict and turning Kashmir into
another weapon against Pakistan's stability.

Question: The "Arab" fighters in Afghanistan - are they a state with a state, or the
long arm for covert operations (e.g., the assassination of Massoud) for the
Taliban? Who is the dog and who is the tail?

Answer:The dog and tail can get very entangled here. Everybody is exploiting
everybody, and finally all organizations and states are tools which consist of
individuals and used by them. The Arabs in Afghanistan are indeed Arabs. There
are also lots of "Pakistani" volunteers on the Taliban side, but these are
mainly Pashtuns, that is, Afghans.

The mentioning of Chechens, Uighurs and so on is more designed to satisfy the
propaganda purposes of Russia and China. There are less than one million
Chechens and they have a very harsh war going on in Chechnya. Chechens who
choose to go to Afghanistan instead must be quite unpatriotic.

The Arabs form the hard core of Al-Qaida. They are the Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi
etc. professional revolutionaries and terrorists who have gathered around the
figurehead of Osama bin Laden. Many of these share the same old background in
Marxist-inspired revolutionary movements in the Middle East. Ideology and facade
have changed when green replaced red, but their methods as well as foreign
contacts have mainly remained the same. This is why they are much more
interested in attacking the West and pro-Western Muslim regimes than in
supporting any true national liberation movements. Even if they try to
infiltrate and influence conflict outcomes in the Balkans, the Caucasus, East
Turkistan and Kashmir, they are set against the nationalist and secular - and
usually pro-Western - policies of the legitimate leadership of these
secessionist movements. So the people whom Al-Qaida may support and try to
infiltrate are usually exiled or otherwise opposition forces acting in fact
against the idea of independence. This has been the case in Chechnya, Dagestan,
Bosnia, Kashmir and so on.

And this has been the case in Afghanistan as well. Osama bin Laden and his Arabs
never contributed to the actual Afghan national liberation struggle. Instead
they acted against it by infiltrating Afghan circles and turning them against
each other. Their jihad is not intended to defend the Muslims against infidel
oppressors, but to cause chaos and destruction, in which they apparently hope to
overthrow Muslim regimes and replace them with the utopia of Salafi rule. It is
not hard to see how this set of mind was inherited from the communist utopian
terrorist movements that preceded the present Islamist ones. They had the same
structures, the same cadres, the same leaders, the same sponsors and the same
methods.

The Arabs in Afghanistan have feathered their nests, though. Osama bin Laden and
his closest associates have all married daughters of Afghan elders - from
different factions and tribes - and their sons and daughters have, in turn,
married the off-spring of eminent Afghan leaders. This is how they secured their
foothold in Afghan social networks - something neither the West nor Pakistan
succeeded to do. When issues are reduced to family relationships, it is not to
be expected that the Afghans would hand over the Arabs to the West or to
Pakistan. Al-Qaida is not only fortifying itself physically, but also socially.
At the same time their cells and countless collaborating agencies - some of whom
are clearly non-Islamist, and some of which are government agencies of certain
hostile states - are hoping to escalate this "war against terrorism" and to
exploit it for their own purposes.

Question: Do you believe that the USA had long standing designs to
conquer Afghanistan and used the September 11 atrocities as a pretext?

Answer:I would rather say that somebody else had long standing designs for a
major conflict in which it was necessary to get the US involved. Those who wiped
out Mr. Massoud a couple of days before the terror strikes in the US probably
knew that the terrorists will be hunted in Afghanistan.

It is clear that the US, among many others, has long desired to overthrow the
Taliban, and I see nothing wrong with it. Afghanistan was the easiest target,
because the Taliban was not internationally recognized (except by three
countries at the beginning of the war), and because there was nobody strong
enough to really side with the Taliban. There was no special need to demonize
them, as they seemed to have done a good job demonizing themselves. The West was
more concerned with the blowing up a couple of Buddha statues than with the
thousands of victims of the Taliban's tyranny and of the civil war that
continued to rage in Afghanistan all this time totally ignored by the Western
media until the US got involved again. The US can, of course, be blamed for
hypocrisy, as always, but the truth is that getting the US involved has greatly
helped those in Afghanistan who had hoped for decades to overthrow the Taliban.

It is also quite surprising that even Musharraf's Pakistan seems to have
actually benefited from the present course of affairs, since terrorism has given
Musharraf the pretext of openly siding with the West, and abandoning all
remnants of Pakistan's tolerance of the Taliban.

Still I would be inclined against any conspiratorial depiction of the recent
events that would blame the US for all that happened. The US had to react, and
Afghanistan was a logical target. In this sense, the US did what the terrorists
wanted. But they did so in a much more moderate way, and after much longer
preparations than their enemies had probably hoped for. One reason is that in
the Bush administration there seems to be significantly more foreign political
expertise than in the Clinton administration that hastily bombed a couple of
targets, including a factory in Sudan, but always failed to respond to the real
challenge.

In the long run, the threat posed by terrorism will not be defeated by military
operations and not in Afghanistan. What can be done there is just the removal of
the Taliban regime and helping to construct a stable and recognized Afghan
government. It is important to give security guarantees to Pakistan and to
support the development that is transforming Pakistan into a strong and
relatively stable pro-Western Muslim country that can play a similar role in
Central and Southern Asia as Turkey does in the West and Middle East. At best,
this could even encourage a Musharraf to rise in Iran, which would yield
ultimate benefits to Western interests in Asia.

But then, terrorism must be fought by other means.

This means that Western intelligence must rise to the level of the Cold War to
face challenges by terrorist organizations as well as by colluding governments.
The West must also resist Huntington's vision coming true, since this is exactly
what the terrorists want: a clash of civilizations. And we must keep in mind
that there are also many others who would like to see a worldwide conflagration
between the West and Islam.

Question: What is the geostrategic and geopolitical importance of Afghanistan?

Answer:Afghanistan is not so significant in itself, if we only consider
economic interests. Of more importance are some countries situated near
Afghanistan, especially those in Central Asia and Azerbaijan. Afghanistan is
also a traditional buffer zone, since its landscape is hard to penetrate for
tanks and modern armies. It has prevented the expansion of the Eurasian
Heartland Empire towards Eurasia's southern rim lands for centuries. It has
protected the areas included in Pakistan and India today, but on the other hand,
turning Afghanistan into a politically or militarily active area was used to
destabilize Pakistan, or Central Asia, in order to alter the status quo,
whatever it was.

Regarding oil, Afghanistan again forms a bridge or a barrier. As long as Iran is
regarded as a hostile country by the US, Afghanistan forms an oil transport
route from Central Asia to Pakistan. As long as there is war in Afghanistan, it
remains a barrier preventing the countries of the Caspian Sea from benefiting
from their oil. Wars in the Caucasus have exactly the same outcome. While this
is the case, only Russia and perhaps China will have access to and hegemony over
the energy resources in the vast Eurasian heart-land.

I think this is the main geopolitical importance of both Afghanistan and the
Caucasus. It is the question of Russia monopolizing the geopolitical heartland,
first and foremost. Considering the colossal weight of geopolitics and
geopolitical thought in present Russian security thinking, these implications
cannot be overestimated.

Question: Can Turkey be drawn into the conflict and, if yes, what
effect will this have on Iran, Central Asia, and NATO?

Answer:It seems Turkey has been drawn into it already. Or rather, Turkey has
volunteered to be drawn into it. Iran and Russia, of course, share a very
hostile attitude towards any expansion of Turkish influence in Central Asia and
the Caucasus. Turkey and Pakistan, on the other hand, may finally find each
other after a long period of mutual hostility. They both share a similar
geopolitical importance as potential guardians of the West. They are among the
most important rim land nations, to borrow a phrase from classical geopolitics.
This means that they are also the most important barriers on the way of a
heartland empire to aspire to sole Eurasian hegemony.

Turkey has sought to advocate its interests in Central Asia, where most of the
Turkistani nations are ethnically Turkic (that is, Uzbeks, Turkmens, Kazakhs,
Kyrgyz and Uighurs, while Tajiks are Persian). At the beginning of the 1990's
Turkey tried to play the ethnic and linguistic cards and the Central Asians were
quite enthusiastic to embrace "the Turkish model" - that is, a Western
orientation and secular state. But the Central Asian states are still dominated
by communist nomenclatures
with strong ties with Moscow.

Turkey's economic problems and generally overly cautious foreign policy have
greatly undermined its capacity to advocate its own and Western interests in
Central Asia. Moreover, the Central Asian dictators have interpreted the
"Turkish model" in most peculiar ways, being often closer to the Chinese model
than the Turkish one.

I think Turkey is again trying to prove how pro-Western it is and how loyal it
is to NATO. The West has usually been much less loyal to Turkey. When it comes
to NATO's influence in Central Eurasia, once Afghanistan is pacified and US
presence probably strengthened through Uzbekistan (though it is one of the
notoriously disloyal allies of any Western interest, much resembling the role
played by Saudi Arabia), it is time to come to Georgia's rescue again. The West
had better not be too late in coming to the aid of Georgia and Azerbaijan, which
are both under serious Russian pressure right now. If the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline
can be completed, then it could be time for a major reform in Iran as well.

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